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Monday, February 9, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: Player vs. Player

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This book looked very promising and the summery look like a book I would really want to read, except I forgot about one thing….GAMING…. I know nothing about gaming which in turned left me feeling a little retarded throughout this book.

Niles River and his twin brother Jordan River work together at Third Wave Studios, where they create first person player video games

Third Wave is owned by a Latina woman (who is also Niles’s best friend) whose mission is to make games more representative of the changing face of society. Until now gamers have been mostly white cis heterosexual men. Anyone who didn’t fit into that mold was shunned, bullied or worse. So if a woman or a gay man wanted to play in the interactive games, she or he needed to pretend to be something they weren’t. Rosie’s goal is to include characters in her games that are strong, independent women, gay men involved in relationships, as well as people with brown and black and yellow skin. While playing the games, the player character makes different choices which determine where they game will take them and the characters created by Third Wave.

Suffice to say that Third Wave has had more than its share of hate mail and threats of violence, rape, and even death. When at a con, Niles and Rosie witness the physical harassment the cosplayers dressed as some of their more controversial characters suffer. It makes them both sick to think that they play even a small part in the suffering these people are going through. It also makes them more determined than ever to make their games as inclusive as possible.

While the Third Wave team is used to on-line and e-mail harassment, a line is crossed when a threatening letter is hand-delivered to Niles’s house. When Rosie & Jordan convince him to take the letter to the police, the detective he ends up with is his closeted college lover; Tim Wyatt, who broke his heart ten years ago and whom he hasn’t seen since. Once Tim sees the letter and the texts on Niles’s personal cell phone, he decides to open a case.

Soon, the Homicides that Tim and his partner are working take them to the offices of Third Wave and it becomes apparent that someone or a group of people is acting out the worst-case scenarios of the game. The terrible end that would come to the Third Wave characters if the player character made all the wrong choices throughout the game. In order to know what these outcomes are, the murderer has to have access to inside information about parts of the game that haven’t been released yet.